“All the world’s a stage, And all the men and women merely players; They have their exits and their entrances; And one man in his time plays many parts” —William Shakespeare, from As You Like It
That LVMH took a minority stake in Our Legacy in November is big news—big news that, thankfully, had no visible impact on the brand’s strong showing for fall. Why fix what’s not broken? According to designer Cristopher Nying, the plan is for OL to keep on keeping on with their winning formula, while using the conglomerate’s know-how to enhance production and transform the OL experience at retail.
Personified, Our Legacy is the strong, silent type in a world where it seems like you have to shout to be heard. Nying’s designs are defined by nuance and subtly; this season he pushed those qualities to the limit by trying to capture, through color and texture, the deep and layered aromas that are to be found in cigars shops. On a call, the designer spoke of the transformation, in Stockholm, of smoky old-school tabak kiosks a-jumble with magazines, chocolates and snus into characterless parcel centers. Building on that idea, the team used the boxes the clothes had been shipped in and packing tape to construct a homely kraft-paper tobacconist shop in the middle of a slick, white industrial space, with walls made of black-and-white photos of the collection printed, as if floating, on plastic. The contrast between the dry, porous paper—a natural material—and the slick transparency of the synthetic plastic set up one of the many dichotomies at play in the collection.
Transformation, especially in relation to the environment, was Nying’s preoccupation this season. It’s not only his local tabak that’s been altered; the designer recounted that he ran into a man he played floor hockey with in the park, and didn’t recognize him out of context. Running with that idea, two different sets have been created for the lookbook, in which the images are meant to be read in pairs. The environment on the left, all warm, polished wood, is meant to resemble an auditorium—aula in Swedish, which is the title of the collection. (Shades of Tár?) The set on the right side features painted wood paneling and plastic stretched on a frame, and the idea, Nying explained, was that the atmosphere should be tinged yellow as if things had been smoke stained. That concept was cleverly materialized in a pair of jeans that fade to a buttery color rather than white. There was sly humor, too, in having look one be a variant on a smoking—in this case a wrap jacket with a body in “ash gray” melton. (Tobacco brown was another hue on the season’s color card.)